


done some things that i can't speak

by clean



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Internalized Homophobia, Multi, canon-compliant depending on whether or not you think jughead is a repressed gay man
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-21
Updated: 2020-10-21
Packaged: 2021-03-08 17:07:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,749
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27130201
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clean/pseuds/clean
Summary: The new kid doesn’t even wait five minutes to start problems.
Relationships: Archie Andrews/Jughead Jones, Jughead Jones/Bret Weston Wallis
Comments: 5
Kudos: 56





	done some things that i can't speak

**Author's Note:**

> content warnings: internalized homophobia, violence, abuse (as described in canon). nothing explicit or overly graphic, but still.

The new kid doesn’t even wait five minutes to start problems.

“I don’t think love always has to be violent,” Forsythe says, his first official day of seminar, after Chipping reads his daily “poem for thought”, as he likes to refer to them. Donna raises her eyebrows in Bret’s direction, and he knows she’s thinking the same thing he is: It’s common knowledge that you don’t make comments outside of discussion so that class flows better. Apparently no one’s relayed the unspoken rules to him yet.

“Well, sometimes that’s just...how it is,” Jonathan responds. Even he looks as taken aback as the rest of them, and he’s usually the best at not reacting, but Forsythe doesn’t seem to notice—who does he think he is? He’s the first student to join the creative writing track full-time in a while, so his place in the classroom is already fragile. But he continues anyway.

“I feel like, especially in modern prose poetry, there’s a lot of poems with this idea that there’s no love without cruelty. I don’t know, I just don’t think that always has to be true.”

It’s silent for a second. Mr. Chipping just stares at the five of them.

“I think you’re right,” Joan finally adds. “But I think a lot of modern love poetry also wants to get into the effects of power and influence. Not that they didn’t do that before, but there’s a lot more work in the genre specifically about explicitly unhealthy relationships, now.”

“Like, popular ones,” Jonathan agrees, and Bret almost wants to make a snide comment but he can’t come up with something that connects the three of them besides the fact that they all have J-names, so he stays silent for the time being. Mr. Chipping seems to enjoy their discourse, anyway; maybe they’d been doing it wrong before after all.

Bret catches Forsythe after class, steps in front of him before he can leave the classroom. He’s not small or anything, but he’s shorter than Bret and it gives him at least some semblance of control.

“Forsythe,” he starts, about to lay down the law, but he stops Bret with a hand motion.

“Sorry, I have AP calc,” he says, only sort of apologetic about it. “Tell me later?”

Bret decides there that he hates him.

  
  


_For all is useless without that which you may guess at many times and not hit, that which I hinted at; / Therefore release me and depart on your way._

  
  


The day before Bret leaves for Stonewall Prep for the first time, his father catches him by the shoulders and tells him he’s going to be class president. Doesn’t ask him if it’s what he wants, or tell him that he’s going to miss him while he’s gone, or that he loves him. He says Bret’s going to be class president and football captain and a womanizer and an academic prodigy, no one’s ever going to tell him what to do, and Bret doesn’t care about any of those things, just wants to write his stories as far away from the Wallis residence as possible. _Yes, sir,_ he tells him.

He tries. He’s not class president, but he does score VP; he’s football captain, even though some of the guys on the team mumble under their breaths about him not deserving it; he’s got a 4.0 unweighted, even though he had to cheat on his physics final first semester of junior year to keep it.

He doesn’t quite hit _womanizer._ At home, over one Thanksgiving break, his father makes a comment about girls at the dinner table, something Bret blocks out of his mind almost immediately. He gives some answer that he doesn’t recall—the only part he remembers is his mother’s expression through the kitchen doorway as she put away a plate, horrified and open-mouthed, as if afraid of him.

He still tries. He and Donna try it once, even. Sophomore year, slightly drunk, after a party that fizzles out before it’s even started because of campus security interference. She’s his companion in a way than Jonathan and Joan aren’t, because they have other friends in the art and music concentrations and Donna is intense and she has _no one,_ she promises him a few months after they first meet, _because no one else cares about us like we care about each other, it’s just you and me against the world._

Apparently, this doesn’t translate well to kissing. Their teeth keep clacking together and Donna bites at his bottom lip like she’s trying to draw blood, which is terrifying and not at all attractive. The thing is that Bret has gotten used to feeling like a predator, too sharp and too large for his bones; Donna still somehow manages to make him feel like prey.

In a moment of clarity, he shoves her off of him. She stares at him, wide-eyed.

“Am I bad?” she asks, worried. Bret has never seen her worried. “I don’t think so. I hope not. I can be better.”

“No,” he tells her, pushing her hand away from where it’s edging towards the button at his collar. “No, it’s because of me. I’m sorry.”

“I can make it good,” Donna pleads. “I’m sorry. Let me help. I can do better.” She looks at him with something between pity and pain.

_“No,”_ he repeats. “No, we don’t—I can’t—” She nods, blinks, and seems to pull herself together like a switch has been flicked.

“I’m going to go,” she says more firmly, hands smoothing over her blazer, gently tugging at the ends of her sleeves as she does.

  
  


_In sunlight we are free to move, and hold / Our open assignations, yet / Each love defines its proper obstacles: / Our frowning Montague and Capulet / Are air, not individuals / And have no faces for their frowns to fold._

  
  


After Betty confesses to kissing a girl, Bret gets curious. They’re both wide awake the night before the AP Gov midterm, so Bret just asks: “You ever done anything with a guy before?”

“No,” Forsythe answers, too quickly and too defensive. “Of course not.”

_“Of course not,”_ Bret mimics in a high voice. “What? It’s not something to be embarrassed of.”

“No, I didn’t mean to… I have gay friends,” he responds. It’s a lame excuse. “I’m just not like that.”

“Your girlfriend seems to be _like that,”_ Bret says. He knows his tone makes himself sound like one of those guys who just thinks the mental image of girls kissing is hot, and he can’t bring himself to care. Better that than the alternative.

“I still don’t really get that, to be fair,” Forsythe admits. “But I don’t know. We all—we’ve all thought about it, you know? When people tell you that you like your best friend a little too much. Doesn’t mean anything.”

“Not everyone thinks about it.” That makes Forsythe look up from the notes he’s organizing, and they make eye contact for a second. He looks away first.

“I have a girlfriend,” he says. He doesn’t deny it, though, and Bret—Bret’s never had a _guy_ best friend, he’s only ever had Donna. But there were family friends when he was younger, and there was that one time with Noah, the son of one of his father’s sailing buddies—not everyone thinks about it, but sometimes, well.

“I never said you didn’t,” Bret answers. “Let me guess, you knew all about Marmaduke, right? Word gets around.”

“I don’t know what you’re implying. Moose is,” Forsythe starts, but seems to think the better of it. He definitely gets the implication. “It’s a small town. His ex-boyfriend is one of my girlfriend’s closest friends. Obviously I knew him.”

“Your girlfriend? Betty?” Bret asks. He’s not really interested past what he knows already, and he already knows as much as he needs to, but he might as well humor him. “I saw the picture on the wall.”

“Yeah,” he says. “But you’re not getting anything more, so give it up.”

Bret puts his hands up. “Didn’t ask for anything more,” he says, but later that night he finds her Instagram. Her feed is mostly a blur of those student council-type Photoshop graphics talking about spirit week days and snapshots of victorious academic championship teams, broken up by occasional photos of her clinging to a brunette who dresses more like a new-money socialite than a small-town it-girl. Overall, it’s a quintessential type-A girl kind of social media profile.

There is one post that makes Bret pause: a picture of a tall redhead in a royal blue varsity jacket, one of the ones Bret knows the Riverdale High football team wears. Betty isn’t in the photo, assumedly having been the one to take it, but Forsythe is, smiling up at the Riverdale football player, who’s got his arms around him. If Bret hadn’t known any better, he would’ve thought it looked like just another normal photo of some basic high-school couple.

_My favorite boys,_ she’d captioned it. Forsythe hadn’t commented on the post.

  
  


_I wanted the end / several times / but thought, / Who owns this body, really? / God? / Dirt? / The silly insects / that will feast / on my decay?_

  
  


At a Quill and Skull party in February, Bret feels a tap on his shoulder and turns only to come face-to-face with Forsythe, who apparently hasn’t learned his lesson already. For once he doesn’t have that ugly hat on, obviously a momentous occasion: Bret’s never really seen him without it, and they live together, so.

“Hey,” he says, sounding too low and too suggestive. He lightly touches Bret’s arm, and Bret’s not bad at reading people—nothing like how critically observant Donna is, but he’s not stupid.

“What are you doing,” Bret says, flat. There’s no question in it, really. “You have a girlfriend,” even though he doesn’t _really_ care, but she seems to have some borderline-murderous tendencies and he’s fine with letting sleeping dogs lie.

“I do,” Forsythe agrees. “I also want to know what happened to Moose. And what all of you are planning with that book deal.” He’s still touching Bret’s arm. Barely, but he is, and Bret checks to see if anyone’s watching. “I was thinking maybe you could, you know… show me.”

The thing is that he’s so good at it, Bret almost believes it for a second. Not that he’d ever admit that. “Nice try, Forsythe,” he says instead, pushing his hand away. “One or two conversations and you think you know me.”

“I do,” Forsythe says. “I’m a writer. Why wouldn’t I?”

(He walks away, but the interaction lingers—later that night, after the party, Bret and Donna try again, just to show themselves they can. They don’t even make it to first base before they both feel too uncomfortable to keep going, and it feels more than ever like Bret’s never going to be able to talk back to his father.)

(He agrees to her plan that night. Donna smiles, all teeth, and tells him _we’re such a great team.)_

  
  


_That part about the body / asking for it, / to be broken into—is that the first, or last part?_

  
  


There are some nights that never fade from memory. _Prove it to me,_ his father had said, _prove it. Prove you can do it or I’ll kill you, I swear I’ll do it, I’ll strangle you with my own hands._ And Bret had said _yes, sir,_ because there was nothing else he could say, nothing else he could even come up with; doesn’t remember her face or what she looked like or anything besides how bad it felt, besides crying, besides hiding it, besides how his father had looked at him after.

That part he remembers the most, and he sees it in his mind every time Donna pulls her sleeves down, every time Forsythe flinches when Mr. Chipping steps towards him too fast. It feels like there was never a time he had the luxury of not noticing every little scar left on the people around him, and that’s why love is _always_ violent, has never been a peaceful thing.

  
  


_Yes, I was jealous when you threw the glass. / I wanted the shattering against the wood-paneled floor for myself, / to be the sudden diaspora of its pieces across the apartment — and last night / when we fought, I wanted you to hit me so badly I begged._

  
  


It’s the Bulldog QB who seems to want to fight him the most, which is funny, because their most intimidating player is already out of commission and Bret has a few inches on this guy, easy. 

And then, you know, he almost shatters his jaw.

There’s a lot of blood, more than Bret’s had on his hands in… a while, since the last time Donna took him out to the woods and disappeared, and he wondered if she was out killing small animals for enjoyment or something equally psychotic when she returned and pressed their hands together so that his were stained as red as hers. _Here,_ she’d said, _now we’re blood brothers,_ and Bret had thought that in any case, Donna could easily serve as the gothic villain of the crime novel she so desperately wants to publish.

And of course Forsythe is there and he’s defending him, or just attempting to break up the fight at the very least. It’s nicer to imagine that someone’s on Bret’s side, even if there’s not a single person in this room who likes him right now; the Stallions follow out of fear, and the Bulldogs just hate him.

But he’s not here for Bret. “Arch,” he hisses, pressing a hand flat to the chest of the quarterback, fingers curling into his shirt. The football player looks away from Bret immediately, dropping his hold on him as if burned by the touch. “Stop that. He’s not worth it.”

Even through the pain, blood spilling all over his hands, the commotion caused by the arrival of campus security, Bret realizes that it was never really Betty he was competing with. They weren’t even in the same league.

  
  


_I’ll be back, I'll re- / emerge, defeated, from the valley; you don’t want me to go where you go, so I go where you don’t / want me to. It’s only afternoon, there’s a lot ahead._

  
  


There’s a photo hanging above Forsythe’s bed. There used to be two, because while trying to write Bret had taken up a habit of holding staring contests with what he assumes was Betty’s cheer headshot, all blue and gold and too bright for the room. But there’s only one now, because the cheer headshot’s been moved to the pinboard above the desk for reasons Bret isn’t quite aware of.

The placement doesn’t really matter. What matters is the photo; the same one that Forsythe has as his Facebook cover photo, which Bret knows because Donna forced him to cyber-stalk him and also because he’s looked at it in his own time, in the dark, while not logged in, as if any of those things made it feel less shameful. In it he’s laughing, and the same Riverdale quarterback who’d almost broken his jaw—Archie, Bret knows now, the same protagonist of every one of Forsythe’s stories, every single terrible work of autobiographical fiction he’s ever written—is looking over at him.

Forsythe catches him glancing at it one night, and he takes it off the wall, long fingers gently removing the pushpin and brushing over the edges of the film. He stands in the center of the room and looks down at it, and Bret isn’t sure if he’s about to hand it to him or if he’s still thinking of the perfect witty comeback.

“He’s my best friend,” he says softly. It’s like he forgets Bret’s in the room for a second.

  
  


_You could drown in those eyes, I said, / so it’s summer, so it’s suicide, / so we’re helpless in sleep and struggling at the bottom of the pool._

  
  


The night of the party, Bret is red and blue and gold and for once he’s _confident._ He and Archie lock eyes across the clearing; he’s got an arm around a pretty brunette in a black coat. Bret may not be able to take him in a fight, but he’s about to get back at him nonetheless. Betty, too, and most of all Forsythe.

“Go time,” Donna says, lightly touching his arm, and Bret nods; for a moment, almost responds _yes, sir._

**Author's Note:**

> the poems quoted, in order: “whoever you are holding me now in hand” - walt whitman, “during an absence” - thom gunn, “tenor” - luther hughes, “mirror, window, mirror” - carl phillips, “tenderness” - jameson fitzpatrick, “meditations in an emergency” - frank o'hara, “little beast” - richard siken. in canon, i think bret’s a lot more boring and would hype bukowski or something, but let’s pretend.
> 
> title taken from [haunting](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjyGkvNUtRU) \- halsey. feel free to leave a comment or talk to me over on [tumblr](https://englishmajorjughead.tumblr.com/)


End file.
